hummingbird - no bullshit HTTP load testing suite

hstress generates large HTTP workloads.

Options are as follows:

hstress [-c CONCURRENCY] [-b BUCKETS] [-n COUNT] [-p NUMPROCS] [-r RPC] [-i INTERVAL] [HOST] [PORT]

The default host is 127.0.0.1, and the default port is 80.

• -c controls concurrency. This is the number of outstanding requests at a given time

• -b sets the "bucket spec". This determines how we bucket the measurement histograms. Set to a comma-separated list of values in milliseconds. For example 1,10,100,250,500 will bucket requests into the given amount of milliseconds.

• -n controls the total number of requests to make. Left unspecified, hb never terminates.

• -r specifies the number of requests per connection (default is no limit)

• -p controls the number of processes to fork (for multiple event loops). The default value is 1.

• -i specifies the reporting interval in seconds

hb produces output like the following:

$ hb -n100000 -c20 localhost 8080
# params: c=20 p=1 n=100000 r=-1
# ts        errors   timeout  closes     <1        <10       <100     >=100    hz
1310334247  0        0        220        22393     93        0        0        22351
1310334248  0        0        220        22637     30        0        0        22689
1310334249  0        0        226        22566     37        0        0        22625
1310334250  0        0        230        22439     51        0        0        22490
1310334250  0        0        115        9752      21        0        0        22727
# total		100019
# errors	0
# timeouts	0
# closes	1011
# <1		99787
# <10		232
# <100		0
# >=100		0
# hz		22542

The first column is the timestamp, and the subsequent columns are according to the specified bucketing (controlled via -b). This output format is handy for analysis with the standard Unix tools. The banner is written to stderr, so only the data values are emitted to stdout.

hplay replays http requests at a constant rate. E.g.

# hplay localhost 8000 100 httpreqs

will replay the HTTP requests stored in httpreqs to localhost:8000 at a rate of 100 per second. Request parsing is robust so you can give it packet dumps.

For example, on a server host that receives requests you wish to replay:

$ tcpdump -n -c500 -i any dst port 10100 -s0 -w capture

Then reconstruct it with tcpflow:

$ tcpflow -r capture -c | sed 's/^...\....\....\....\......\-...\....\....\....\......: //g' > reqs

And finally, replay these requests onto localhost:8000:

$ hplay localhost 8000 100 reqs

hserve is a simple HTTP server that will yield a constant response.

• support for constant rate load generation
• should be split into two programs? load generation & http requests?